New website honors Madison's rst poet laureate There are many adjectives that might be used to describe John Tuschen, Madison’s rst and longest-serving poet laureate, but “tidy” is not among them. I once wrote of Tuschen, who died in 2005 at age 55: “He looked and acted like I thought a poet should. Tuschen was thin, angular, unkempt, shy, complicated, gentle in person but erce on the page, wry, contrary, a reader, a drinker — a man never to be gentri ed.” But tidy — no. “When my father passed,” Jordan Caylor told me last week, by phone from Spain, “he’d left a bunch of documents on his desk, with notes and polishes and things like that.” He added, “There was a big paper on top of it that said, ‘Watch my back, please.’ So basically I’m just trying to do what he was asking.” Caylor has done much more than that. He has created a website honoring his father that includes links to Tuschen’s poetry, live readings, articles about Tuschen, and a wonderful short lm Caylor produced inspired by his dad’s reading of his poem “Uncle Harry’s Tombstone.” The site is a work in progress, and Caylor is currently attempting to x some uncooperative links. “But I thought,” he said, “that I might as well let it loose and see what people think. And let them know it’s an ongoing project.” Tuschen — never John, even to friends — was born in Chicago and graduated (class president) from Columbus High School in Wisconsin. He landed in Madison in the late 1960s, and read his poetry publicly for the rst time in the city in 1968, at an event at a women’s center on Gilman Street. “I was shaking in my boots,” Tuschen once told me about that night, and indeed, at the last minute he’d offered the guy sitting next to him $10 to impersonate him onstage. The offer was declined, and later, as Tuschen exited the stage, a voice called, “Now there’s a poet!” Tuschen traveled, giving readings from Toronto to Paris, but Madison was home, and in 1977 — at a party celebrating the rst anniversary of the launch of Isthmus — Mayor Paul Soglin announced his intention to name Tuschen the city’s poet laureate, a post he held for 23 years. In 2000, when Gov. Tommy Thompson’s administration announced its intention to name a state poet laureate, I immediately thought of Tuschen. We’d met in the 1980s as presenters at a high school writing seminar, though hadn’t stayed in touch. By 2000 I was writing a newspaper column and wanted to advance Tuschen for the state laureate gig, but I couldn’t nd him. His last mention in a Madison newspaper was six years earlier, when the 602 Club, a favorite University Avenue bar, closed. I wrote a column about him, and Tuschen called me at the paper. He was living on State Street, he said. Maybe we could get a beer at Nick’s? I don’t think Tuschen ever applied for the state laureate post, but we became good friends. I think he liked it when I wrote about him in The Capital Times, and — on my end — Tuschen made great copy. Like the time in 2002 when he walked into a used bookstore on Madison’s westside and saw one of his poetry collections, “Tuschenetrics: Poems from a Cloth Room and Paris,” for sale for $250. “Why so much?” Tuschen asked. “The author was a local poet who died,” the clerk said. Acclaim can be hard to come by for poets, but in 1999, the online journal Poetic Voices published a lengthy pro le of Tuschen that included a portion of Soglin’s 1977 poet laureate proclamation: "Whereas, John Tuschen has been a major gure in the local community arts movement for many years; and whereas, he has contributed greatly to the rebirth of poetry and poetry readings in our city; and whereas, John Tuschen represents Madison's ability to keep the arts alive, growing, ourishing, and most importantly, to keep the arts recognized as a service to be patronized and supported by the public....” Decades on, in the last years of his life, Tuschen was still writing poems. “It’s an obsession,” the celebrated poet Allen Ginsberg once told him, “and you have it.” In 2003 — the 35th anniversary of his rst Madison reading on Gilman Street — Tuschen gave a reading at the same location, which by then was Avol’s Books. At the same time, he was promoting other poets, publishing the State Street Poetry Sheet, which Suni Caylor, Jordan’s mother, collected in a book in 2016 with a grant from the Madison Arts Commission. Jordan Caylor told me he’s been working on and off for most of a year to pull together the material for the new website, and it is impressive in its scope. Caylor, who is 46, has lived in Spain for the past 19 years, currently in the province of Cádiz. He’s not seen — at least in person — the remarkable father-son tribute that is now embedded in a Monroe Street sidewalk. It’s one of 12 poems the Madison Arts Commission selected to be embedded along Monroe Street in 2018. It is titled, “Poem for Jordan.” It reads: Best friend, cosmic baby, your river name is my passageway to joy and nearly freedom. “What an honor,” Caylor said, when I asked about the poem’s presence on Monroe Street. “I was very surprised and humbled by that.” COPYRIGHT 2023 BY MADISON MAGAZINE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED. John Tuschen's poem is engraved on a Monroe Street sidewalk. Photo by Jean- Marc Richel 1977 Isthmus featuring Mayor Paul Soglin naming John Tuschen Madison's rst poet laureate. Originally printed in Isthmus Poet John Tuschen Photo by Jean-Marc Richel